ne day Murlock was found in his cabin, dead. It was not a time and
place for coroners and newspapers, and I suppose it was agreed that he
had died from natural causes or I should have been told, and should
remember. I know only that with what was probably a sense of the fitness
of things the body was buried near the cabin, alongside the grave of his
wife, who had preceded him by so many years that local tradition had
retained hardly a hint of her existence. That closes the final chapter
of this true story--excepting, indeed, the circumstance that many years
afterward, in company with an equally intrepid spirit, I penetrated to
the place and ventured near enough to the ruined cabin to throw a stone
against it, and ran away to avoid the ghost which every well-informed
boy thereabout knew haunted the spot. But there is an earlier chapter--
that supplied by my grandfather.

When Murlock built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with his ax
to hew out a farm--the rifle, meanwhile, his means of support--he was
young, strong and full of hope. In that eastern country whence he came
he had married, as was the fashion, a young woman in all ways worthy of
his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot
with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record of her
name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and the
doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I
should share it! Of their affection and happiness there is abundant
assurance in every added day of the man's widowed life; for what but the
magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome spirit
to a lot like that?

One day Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the forest to
find his wife prostrate with fever, and delirious. There was no
physician within miles, no neighbor; nor was she in a condition to be
left, to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing her back to
health, but at the end of the third day she fell into unconsciousness
and so passed away, apparently, with never a gleam of returning reason.

From what we know of a nature like his we may venture to sketch in some
of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather. When
convinced that she was dead, Murlock had sense enough to remember that
the dead must be prepared for burial. In performance of this sacred duty
he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly, and others
which